Jean-Michel Jarre will premiere ‘Alone Together’, a 40-minute musical set in the virtual world of VRrOOm, on June 21.
Live from his studio, French musician Jean-Michel Jarre, via his Avatar, will perform live in a virtual stage and universe specially designed and produced by VRrOOm, hosted on VRChat platform and simultaneously broadcast and accessible to everyone online via PC in video game mode, tablets and smartphones in 2D mode, or in total immersion using any tethered VR headset.
This will be a world premiere as to date, all “live” concerts happening inside immersive 3D worlds have in fact previously been pre-recorded and were usually set within preexisting video game universes.
In addition to the digital broadcast, a “silent” broadcast of the virtual concert will be offered in city-center Paris, in the courtyard of the Palais Royal, to a selection of students from schools of the performing arts, training in sound and image, who will only need to bring their mobile phone and headphones to share the live performance on a big screen.
At the end of this simultaneous performance, the participants gathered in the courtyard of the Palais Royal will be able to chat live with Jean-Michel Jarre’s avatar , erasing even further the boundaries between the physical and the virtual worlds. To conclude, the avatar will open a virtual backstage door to which Jarre will welcome the groups of students in person to his studio to share the behind of the scene of the evening .
Having performed concerts in extraordinary venues, virtual reality will now allow me to play in unimaginable spaces while remaining on a physical stage. Virtual or augmented realities can be to the performing arts what the advent of cinema was to the theatre, an additional mode of expression made possible by new technologies at a given time.
Jean-Michel Jarre
The “Alone Together” musical experience, composed by Jean-Michel Jarre, is developed in co-production with VRrOOm (our interview), creator of virtual worlds dedicated to cultural events and hosted on the social XR platform VRChat.
I fell in love with live performance since I was a child, and I was until recently the owner of a theater in the South of France. I have constantly focused on the accessibility to shows and live performances, the evolution of public tastes, the cost of artistic productions and the economical sustainability of the industry. My experience can now be useful as new media emerge thanks to new technologies. I am convinced that the possibilities offered by Virtual Reality will allow us to reinvent economic models and allow the audiences and the artists from around the world to meet and share the incomparable emotion provided by live performances.
Louis Cacciuttolo, VRrOOm
For the occasion, Louis Cacciuttolo has gathered a team of innovative talents such as Pyaré, digital artist, author and director of JET LAG, PATTERNS and SPACED OUT, award-winning interactive virtual reality experiences at Sundance or Montreal, and Vincent Masson, creator of graphic universes who signs opulent chromatic and architectural universes, and who created MORPHOSIS and THE TIDE, among other spectacular works.
A group of startups and technicians expert in their field are contributing to this ambitious project, bringing together immersive technology specialists like Antony Vitillo, VR developer at consultancy agency New Technology Walkers, who is also speaker at major XR conferences and creator of the renowned blog The Ghost Howls, , Manifattura italiana design architects Lapo Germasi and Victor Pukhov, Georgiy Molodtsov, producer of virtual reality content and VR film festivals curator, Jean-Baptiste Friquet, a visual explorer, glitch artist and director for the digital live experiences.
Also involved in the project are tech startups such as SoWhen?, experiential designers responsible for using the technology to transcribe the real performance inside the virtual environment, innovation studio Atelier Daruma with the director Mathias Chelebourg, who is behind the multi-awarded VR experiences ALICE, JACK, and DOCTOR WHO VR: THE RUNAWAY (our interview) and worked on Jean-Michel Jarre’s real-time avatar animation stunt, Seekat, who is simultaneously broadcasting across various digital medias, MindOut the LBE VR specialist who will host the VR experience in its dedicated locations in Paris, Velizy 2 and Lille, and the social XR platform VRChat.
